We Went: The Psychology of Blink

Kane Hall's Room 130 was almost full last night, for "The Psychology of Blink: Understanding How Our Minds Work Unconsciously," the last talk in the 2008 Edwards Psychology Lecture Series at the UW.

The Blink part comes from a reference to Greenwald's work in chapter three of Gladwell's book.

Dr. Anthony Greenwald gave an Implicit Association 101 talk, going back far enough to distinguish it from Freud's free association. The key difference is that he's talking about unconscious cognition, the way our brain presents perceptions "already in progress." Optical illusions are the usual illustration of this, and he awed the crowd assembled with an example, then pointed out that there is no way to stop seeing an optical illusion that arises from the way your brain organizes visual stimuli.

Implicit association researchers have a ton of online tests now, including one we mentioned a while ago on presidential candidate preference. They measure someone's speed at putting a word or image into categories on a spatial plane. Conceptual clusters make this automatic or something we have to think about. Greenwald chose a test to demonstrate a bias toward women minding the home while men hold careers.

Taking the test out loud, we could hear the delay as we intellectually fought with an unconscious ease at classifying women's names with household nouns. Greenwald thinks that this is evidence of sexist bias--not to make a judgment, but to point out that our brains do automate things; if a culture constantly reinforces a bias, it sinks in and is hard to shake. Because some research indicates that people who exhibit strong implicit associations also exhibit complementary behaviors, the thought is that these tests have something important to say about ingrained racism, sexism, and other -isms of ill-repute.

(In fact, the night's second speaker, Dr. Lisa Cooper, is using IAT tests on doctors to study the relationship between their racial associations and the long-studied disparity in healthcare between whites and minorities.)

When IAT gets discussed in public, though, it's easy for the little word "bias" to get lost in favor of the more inflammatory racist or sexist label. When someone categorizes woman and home together, they're enjoying the liberty of not thinking too hard about the context of social equality. When someone says a woman's place is in the home, they're doing something besides categorizing.

At the Q&A, we learned that Greenwald may be director of the Laboratory of Implicit and Unconscious Cognition at the UW, but he doesn't know how his research on implicit associations relates to the teachings of Krishnamurti. The deflated young man who asked the Krishnamurti question had nowhere to go and slunk back to his seat. Very sad. Typical Eurocentric bias.